Gothic

released on Mar 15, 2001

Gothic is a single-player action role-playing video game for Windows developed by the German company Piranha Bytes. It was first released in Germany on March 15, 2001, followed by the English North American release eight months later on November 23, 2001, and the Polish release on March 28, 2002. Gothic has been well received by critics, scoring an average of 80% and 81/100 on Game Rankings' and Metacritic's aggregates, respectively. Reviewers credited the game for its story, complex interaction with other in-game characters, and graphics, but criticized it for the difficult control scheme and high system requirements.


Released on

Genres


More Info on IGDB


Reviews View More

One of my absolute favorite games that I've played through so many times since I was a kid that at some point I stopped counting. I love the world, the characters, the absolutely fantastic dialog and voice acting, the faction system, the music and pretty much everything else. The combat system can be annoying at times but I really don't care too much when playing this masterpiece.

Fantastic and revolutionary for it's time! Open world, peculiar RPG system (Mage's armor is also armor, and infinte inventory), I've spent a lot of happy hours there.

Amazing game!
Good story, amazing game mechanics!

As far as I can tell, there's no way to get through this without being a scumbag, so no thanks.

Everything about this looks visually like shit and its sad that i've gotten to the point of praising something because "it looks ass" and i laugh about it, its like laughing as a kid because because your teacher said "penis" or "vagina", now i dont even know where im getting at with what im saying but is JUST LIKE IN THIS GAME, no i dont want arrows, i dont want to be handheld to where i have to go, but the fact that this gives me the same feeling as [insert empty sandbox openworld] speaks volumes for me so the shelved games it goes, i'll pick you up some day again baby because there's still something in you i could dig up...

The first of the Gothics is a pretty immersive game with unique personal charm. It requires a lot of patience and perseverance, but over time it pays off with a interesting, well-designed world, iconic voice acting, challenging mechanics of melee combat and nice pacing. You start off as an absolute zero who has trouble even trampling an ordinary beetle. This makes progressing in this clumsy but open world even more satisfying.

Still - the fact that this game does not have autoloot by default makes it absolutely unplayable in any other configuration. The sprint exclusive only for a wallet full of ore in the era of constant backtracking is just straight-up time wasting. Broken game economy makes power-gaming this one easy task - for me, too easy. It should be more balanced. When you begin the game, you have no ore and so much to spend it on. 3 chapters after, you can have even thousands of them and no reason to spend.

Besides, I like to pick and choose from whole palette of junk while playing immersive RPGs. It's a bit sad that the game is constructed in such a way that you always end it with the same weapon and grinding for better items becomes pointless at some stage - you always end up with Ancient Ore Armor given to you in form of a quest and Uriziel.

The lack of cyclical autosave, and the full number of game-breaking bugs, such as the one at the end of the game, also do not help. I'm warning you, player! Save your game before talking to Xardas in the Orc ruins. And never overwrite, because you may get softlocked and lose the entire 30 hours of the game. Not to say, the final boss had nice idea, but execution was anti-climatic.

It's also a pity that a game based narratively on a novel about a hero who goes from being an ordinary pushover to becoming a magician - has such crappy and wooden spell casting mechanics.

There was a time when I was playing around with a blue water mage robe on and slashing everything I could with my sword because the spell casting mechanics were just plain unpleasant.

My compatriots from Poland love to overestimate it, but millions of flies can't be wrong - there is something to this shit. Games like Skyrim are boring and cliche in comparison to this. When it was released in 2001, it had to be mind-blowing experience.